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But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil?
And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the
Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but
Vice?
A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by
its divergence from the line of Virtue.
But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we can have of it,
or is there some other way of knowing it?
Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision, for it is utterly
outside of bound and measure; this thing which is nowhere can be
seized only by abstraction; but any degree of evil falling short
of The Absolute is knowable by the extent of that falling short.
We see partial wrong; from what is before us we divine that which
is lacking to the entire form [or Kind] thus indicated; we see
that the completed Kind would be the Indeterminate; by this
process we are able to identify and affirm Evil. In the same way
when we observe what we feel to be an ugly appearance in Matter-
left there because the Reason-Principle has not become so
completely the master as to cover over the unseemliness- we
recognise Ugliness by the falling-short from Ideal-Form.
But how can we identify what has never had any touch of Form?
We utterly eliminate every kind of Form; and the object in which
there is none whatever we call Matter: if we are to see Matter we
must so completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into
our very selves.
In fact it is another Intellectual-Principle, not the true, this
which ventures a vision so uncongenial.
To see darkness the eye withdraws from the light; it is striving
to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the light which would
make the darkness invisible; away from the light its power is
rather that of not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is
its nearest approach to seeing Darkness. So the
Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its contrary [Matter],
must leave its own light locked up within itself, and as it were
go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its
native brightness and submit itself to the very contradition of
its being.
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